Google+ Games is shutting down

https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3123176?hl=en&ref_topic=1334138

by jmillikin • 13 years ago

97 109 13 years ago

support.google.com

ckdarby• 13 years ago

Almost had a nervous break down because I thought Ingress was going to be listed >_> !

Kiro• 13 years ago

Is it fun?

jaredmcateer• 13 years ago

Depends on your personality. If you enjoy stuff like Geocaching, it would probably be fun, but if you live in an area with a limited amount of portals or don't like travelling outside your regular area, not so much.

kailuowang3• 13 years ago

I have some concerns over that too, but ingress is completely independent, which means, if they really don't see it fitting into their strategy they can either spin it off of sell it to another company, hopefully.

Yes Google reader is somewhat independent too, but at least it has "Google" in its name. They can't spin it off of sell it.

anonymfus• 13 years ago

Did Google ever sell some business?

BrianEatWorld• 13 years ago

During the IO stream yesterday, they talked a good deal about Ingress. I think you are safe for now. You may even want to check in on some of their current IO promotions.

nickconfer2• 13 years ago

In short. Google+ is thriving, but we decided to shut down Google+ Games. Look away... Look away.

If you paid for anything contact the companies that are already tired of us and have them solve your problem. Oh and by the way, try our new Google Play Game Service! Hurry, before it's gone!

nickconfer2• 13 years ago

Sorry for the snarky comment. I usually don't make these types of comments but shutting down a service, asking users to do the leg work to solve game credit problems, and then marketing a new service in the same post bugs me.

auxbuss• 13 years ago

No, no. You nailed it succinctly and without bitterness. Well played!

JoeKM3• 13 years ago

I trust if Facebook did the same thing you would post the same snarky comment? (Sorry for the snarky comment)

alec2• 13 years ago

The "shut it down, you lose all your stuff, and we're starting over" strategy worked for Amazon and ereaders (result: Kindle), but hasn't so much for Microsoft and music (result: Zune marketplace).

microtherion• 13 years ago

Maybe Google could license the “Plays4Sure” name for their new game system.

taeric2• 13 years ago

When did I lose anything from Amazon?

michaelochurch10• 13 years ago

Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at least, have to view me as human garbage that was right. Progress, one day at a time.

(My idea that was that we should engage independent developers and provide the resources to integrate them with Hangouts, thus having a double win because we'd both (a) get people comfortable with Hangouts and (b) have a higher quality of games than if we published Zynga dreck.)

tptacek• 13 years ago

Apropos nothing: as many readers of my own comments will happily attest, it is easy to both be right and behave like "human garbage" (or whatever non-hyperbolic term you'd like to substitute for that one).

jmillikin3• 13 years ago

One important contrast with the OP is that although your posts are sometimes blunt, they are almost always cogent and well-argued.

jmillikin3• 13 years ago

  > Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage
  > for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at
  > least, have to view me as human garbage that was right.

Your manifestos were treated with astonishing patience and consideration, given their content and your reaction to criticism.

As I recall, your position was that Google+ Games should prefer intricate rulesets based on obscure board- and card-games on the basis that popular casual games are not sufficiently complex to pose an intellectual challenge.

It seems unlikely that positioning Google+ Games as the place to go for half-baked Catan knockoffs would have made it more popular.

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

Which is not helped by a follow-up of "the most interesting thing about this news item (or, at least, the only thing worth my time to comment on) is that I was correct, generally speaking, and shall now espouse my belief that I'm owed recognition for it."

bdowney• 13 years ago

And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his departure.

yid3• 13 years ago

I have no idea about your past, and I try to read your posts with an open mind, but it's starting to sound increasingly like you have a severe persecution complex. The entire company treated you like "human garbage" and didn't appreciate your gifts? Isn't that a little hyperbolic?

Part of the challenge in working with large groups of people is convincing them that your ideas have merit. That's not unique to Google or any company -- that's just the psychology of social interactions. It sounds like you have an unreasonable expectation that everyone bow down immediately and unquestioningly to your opinions, and leads me to wonder if you have delusions of your own grandeur.

Learning how to interact with people seems to be a skill that you have not acquired, and it certainly makes me want to never work with you.

michaelochurch10• 13 years ago

See, I neither want nor expect anyone to "unquestioningly" listen to my opinions and ideas. That would be a disaster. I have a lot of good ideas, but I have some bad ones too.

What I can't stand is when people don't make the fucking effort to reach the right idea, but just fall back on rank. That will make me very angry.

If they'd given me an explanation of why my idea wouldn't work or why they had to do things a certain way, I would have been happy with that. They could have brought me into a few of the meetings so I'd see how the sausage is made, and maybe I'd realize some of the constraints they were under and see why my idea wouldn't work in that context.

I do, however, expect to be treated as an equal, and I'll raise hell if I'm not. That doesn't mean my ideas are taken without question. Shit, how could anyone even want that? The yes-man behavior (taking someones' ideas without question) isn't respectful; it sets a person up for future embarrassment.

untog• 13 years ago

You write some great posts on HN, but every time Google is so much as mentioned you descend into this same persecution complex. I wish you wouldn't, but I'll try to talk about this in generalities:

"Ha, my negativity has been vindicated by failure!" is never a good public stance to take. Not for you, nor for the people who disagreed with you. It is a victory for you, but it's one to internalise. The people who were there and complete strangers will think less or you for gloating otherwise. Know that you were right, apply the lesson in the future.

metaphorm3• 13 years ago

well now, that is a truly unpleasant level of self-righteousness and resentment.

michaelochurch10• 13 years ago

My manager at Google had a 5-year-long history of using fake performance problems to tease out peoples' health issues, and then using that information to fuck with them. (For one case, there's a year-long record of meetings moved to conflict with therapy sessions.) HR did absolutely nothing about him because he had a reputation for "delivering" in spite of his known sadistic behavior. (I spent months investigating this shit, and went places I didn't belong.)

Oh, and Google is one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project.

It finally ended up being up to me to expose that manager (which I did after finding my next job) and when I did, I experienced some extremely unprofessional attacks. Someone (possibly my ex-manager) found out where my next job was and called in a hit.

Given that, I'm justified in enjoying Google's stumbles.

Mz• 13 years ago

No, they don't actually have to "view you as right," even if you absolutely were.

Intended as helpful: What is the point of your screed here? What do you think it will do for you? What are you trying to accomplish?

People who are awful to you are highly unlikely to own up, apologize, make amends...etc.. Life rarely works that way.

Not trying to make your life harder. I have done some venting myself on HN at times.

piokoch• 13 years ago

That's something that makes me afraid to invest more time in learning Go language.

What if after investing my time in learning Go, one day I'll see Google blog post saying:

"Go lang project at Google is shutting down, we will no longer develop that. But don't worry we decided to donate that project to Apache Software Foundation! It is now called Apache Go. Look for in ASF incubator, just next to Apache Wave (formerly known as Google Wave".

oinksoft• 13 years ago

Go is not a service, it is a language and runtime with open-source implementations. If Go is worthwhile, it will survive even Google shutting down. I don't see why you would find Go under Apache to be bad news.

prostoalex• 13 years ago

Same argument could be applied to Wave (which also featured an open-source client, server and protocol implementations), or OpenSocial (which also featured an "open" set of standards) and yet without a strong and motivated backer such projects stop feature development and fade into oblivion.

MatthewPhillips3• 13 years ago

But Go has Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. And a BSD license. I feel like that's as safe as it gets.

npsimons• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's not like it's some patent encumbered, unreasonable and discriminatory PL . . .

saidajigumi2• 13 years ago

Motion seconded. As someone who's worked with more languages than I care to count, I think Go really is a great contribution. It's not just that there are big names behind it. I have little doubt that it will stand on its own merits precisely because of how its creators' experience and clarity of purpose manifest in pragmatic language design.

FWIW, I'm also really enjoying getting into Rust[1]. At a distance, it's easy to confuse their purposes: both Rust and Go are superficially "new-world systems languages". But the goals and influences of each differ considerably, and this becomes manifest as you dig into them.

[1] Caveat: Rust is definitely still in its pre-release lifecycle. As such don't expect to launch your-next-great-whatever to production with it. But it's a great time for language and software enthusiasts to jump in and have fun.

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

I don't understand these complaints at all. GCC has a Go frontend for fuck sake. Google "shutting down" Go makes as much sense as AT&T "shutting down" C++ and C.

wilfra• 13 years ago

Such is the risk with doing anything on Google these days. G+ will likely eventually be killed off too. Though it may take years. Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android and Analytics I think are probably safe. Only slightly joking.

unsignedint• 13 years ago

Now they have GPG, that's pretty much enables the same kind of functionality and better outside of Google+ Games. So it makes sense, I guess.

jensenbox• 13 years ago

Please send me any data regarding Google shutdowns.

http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/

omarali• 13 years ago

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...

mtext• 13 years ago

blablabla

BoyWizard• 13 years ago

One thing that's missing from the timeline is equivalent services that Google have launched/purchased. For example, Google Video didn't so much 'shut down' as merge with (the arguably better) Youtube.

salimmadjd• 13 years ago

I'm shocked and surprised! How is that possible? after all this was going to be yet another amazing google product built by bunch of smart people that made it through 12 rounds of interview process. To paraphrase, "people with no imaginations hire people with no imagination" :)

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

All shutting down Google+ Games means is that the integration of web games with the Google+ UI is going away in favor of piecemeal integration. Google+ Games is essentially the old Facebook model that even Facebook-linked games are using less, the new model (supported by Google Play Game Services, Google+ SSO, the Google+ Moments API, etc.) is of games (quite often native mobile games rather than web games) that interact with a support platform through a sign-on API, cloud services that provide saves/multiplayer toos/leaderboards/acheivements, and systems that allow integration with social network news feeds.

tarkin2• 13 years ago

This actually makes sense.

The Google play services do seem to offer more.

But do I trust Google's services (especially ones that are open, although I doubt this is or was the case with games) anymore?

No. I trust them about as much as I trust any company's services.

I just didn't think Google were any company, until recently.

kailuowang3• 13 years ago

As a shareholder of Google, it's encouraging for me to see that Google shuts down products that didn't work out really really fast (Nexus Q and now Google+ Games).

glomph• 13 years ago

If only they shut down g+ as fast! :p

pacomerh• 13 years ago

hehe, yeah, Google+ is working, but in a strange way

michaelochurch10• 13 years ago

G+ Games would have worked if they had listened to the right people.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

There are plenty of fantastic ideas, worked on by smart people, at good companies, that fail.

Maybe G+ Games would have been good if Google had listened to the right people, but we don't know that, eh?

I know that I'm probably reading too much into some of your Google posts, but they make me sad. I hope you manage to find something (peace? comfort?) and move on. Like I say, I'm probably mis-reading your posts and maybe I'm talking nonsense.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?

Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't think any of us here in the peanut gallery have enough information to really say. I mean, we can - I suppose - take Google at their word that it wasn't "successful" but we don't know things like:

1. Why wasn't it successful?

2. How are Google defining "successful" here?

3. Are there other decisions or investments that could still be made to make it more "successful"?

4. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation?

4.5 - what are the n-th order effects of the shutdown notice? How will developers react to this? Does it damage trust in Google as a brand? Will there be "downstream" fallout from this?

5. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non game) ecosystem within G+?

6. Etc.

Now I'm not saying Google are wrong to do this... from their perspective it may well be the right decision. Or it might not. Even companies full of very smart people don't always make good decisions on everything.

cthackers• 13 years ago

I don't get why everybody is so whiny and bitchy about what Google does and does not. It's a public company that's in it for money and all the stuff they make and you use for free - be it good or not; costs a lot of money to maintain and host and develop and all that.

It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people...

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

> 1. Why wasn't it successful?

Because the desktop as a target for casual gaming is pretty much dead and the social network desktop web site as a portal to web-based casual games is likewise pretty much dead; Google+ Games was an implementation of Facebook's social-network-web-site-as-portal-for-web-based-casual-games model. A model which even games that integrate with Facebook (for signon, finding opponents, and posting to the Facebook stream) are abandoning in favor of native (usually mobile) games interacting through APIs but not integrating with the social networks Web UI. That model was past its peak when Google+ Games was introduced, and is pretty much dead now (and G+ has much less legacy motivation to retain support for it than Facebook does), so its out the window.

> 4. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation?

Irrelevant, because Google isn't abandoning the idea of having a "Games ecosystem", even one with interacts with Google+ deeply, they are just recognizing that the way to do that isn't to restrict that ecosystem to the G+ Web UI as a portal. That's why the announcement that Google+ Games was being phased out was pretty much simultaneous with the announcement of the availability of the cross-platform (iOS/Android/Web) Google Play Game Services API. (Which is integrated with Google+ -- it subsumes Google+ Sign-On.)

> 5. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non game) ecosystem within G+?

The apps-within-social-network-web-interface model, which was dominated by games, is basically dead in favor of apps (including games) that interact with social networks via an API but which are not web applications integrated with the social network web API as the exclusive portal through which they are accessed. So, insofar as you refer to that model for G+ when you refer to an apps ecosystem "within" G+, you should probably take the shutdown of G+ games as a recognition that Google has little current interest in that model.

As far as an ecosystem of apps (both web and native [especially mobile, in the latter case]) which integrate with G+ features like the message stream, Hangouts, profiles, etc., the recent pushes behind G+ for SSO, the Moments API, the Hangouts API and the move to raise the profile of Hangouts, etc., should be a clue there.

dwc• 13 years ago

When they launched Games on G+ I was pretty excited. I went to play and was greeted with "Games are social!" along with a prompt to share all my social networking info with 3rd parties. Decline and you can't play. Games are social? I'm supposed to hear "social" and just enthusiastically agree to that? Sorry, but no. I never went back.

chintan2• 13 years ago

I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games.

Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+.

jmillikin3• 13 years ago

If you're willing to require your players to use modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and don't care about social network integration, then http://www.webrtc.org/ should be a great alternative.

chintan2• 13 years ago

aha! neat, thanks!

ysangkok2• 13 years ago

Flash has this feature for at least 10 years now. So no need to exclude.

Proof: http://web.archive.org/web/20031221102318/http://www.macrome...

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

> I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games.</blockquote>

Apps (games or not) can still interact with Hangouts via the Hangouts API, which is not affected by G+ Games shutting down.

> Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+.

Aside from embedding the game in the G+ Web UI, what are you missing that you would have had with G+ Games with existing G+ APIs (Hangouts, Moments) and the Google Play Game Services API?

AFAICT, shutting down G+ Games just means that the Google+ UI as a portal to web games is going away.

evolve2k• 13 years ago

Closing Down! Everything must Go!

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

I'm surprised by how many technical people are butt hurt over every subsequent shutdown of a service after Google Reader. It sucks to invest time and effort into something that was assumed to exist, however naively, forever. On the other hand, if we were to hold on to every design and implementation we've ever created without the ability to throw it away, no matter whom or what depends on it, our technological progress would probably be slowed.

Could you imagine if every piece of code you wrote once it was functioning, couldn't be thrown away and you had to support it forever once it existed? That would blow.

It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free.

Just breathe, remember it's not the end of the world, and if you're on the self entitlement band wagon, you're going nowhere fast.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Well, that's one of the major sucky features of the cloud. It's out of your control.

If you want to use a typewriter you can. If you want to still use WordStar or WordPerfect you can (so long as you have hardware it'll run on).

> It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free.

I agree that clinging onto backward compatibility feels like we've hurt progress. Especially since that compatibility was with x86.

CyberDroiD• 13 years ago

I think the correct sentiment: if you're relying on an advertising company like Google, you're going nowhere fast.

JoeKM3• 13 years ago

Relying on a eCommerce company like Amazon, you're going nowhere fast.

I too can make blanket ignorant statements. Google is not just an advertisement company anymore. Haven't been for awhile.

JoeKM3• 13 years ago

What annoys me is it's become a bandwagon for karma. Half the people bitching at Google for shutting some service down probably never even used the service.

Companies kill unpopular or bad products. Google is not unique.

metaphorm3• 13 years ago

can someone explain to me why people view service shutdown's (by Google in particular, it seems) as some kind of epic betrayal?

In every other industry, discontinuing a product is a non-event. In fact, even within the software industry its usually a non-event. Nobody is out there screaming havoc when Goodyear tire discontinues a product line that wasn't selling well. Google isn't allowed to do the same?

methodin• 13 years ago

I forgot that games even existed on it. Did anyone use it? Seems to confirm that Facebook is indeed not their actual competitor.

nichols• 13 years ago

Google's new project will be robots responsible for shutting down old services and groups. Rumor has it that they'll be called "Terminators," and they'll look kind of like this: http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminato...

Google+ Games is shutting down

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